It’s official. If not, it ought to be. Israeli forces freely butcher Palestinians in Gaza of all stripes, standing and states of desperation. They do so casually or indifferently or maliciously. True, they might get the odd militant here and there, but the supposedly professional Israeli Defense Forces is rather good at killing civilians. In what is becoming an almost daily occurrence, Israeli security personnel are slaughtering those seeking humanitarian aid from facilities that are obscenely restricted and appallingly located. What is unclear in the process is how devastating Palestinian militias armed and supported by the Israelis have been in pushing up the mortality count.
In one incident on June 17, Israeli tanks – not exactly a light form of population control – fired into a crown scrounging for aid from trucks in Gaza. The resulting death toll was impressively outrageous: 59 killed. A further 14 were also killed by IDF gunfire and air strikes in the enclave, taking the death toll for June 17 to 73. On this occasion, Israel’s normally mendacious publicity arm in the IDF seemed to concede that the firing had taken place. It followed that yet another cleansing review would take place.
According to Reuters, a witness by the name of Alaa interviewed at Nasser Hospital saw the following spectacle of gore: “All of a sudden, they let us move forward and made everyone gather, and then shells started falling, tank shells.”
The IDF breezily stated that it was “aware of reports regarding a number of injured individuals from IDF fire following the crowd’s approach. The details of the incident are under view. The IDF regrets any harm to uninvolved individuals and operates to minimise harm as much as possible to them while maintaining the safety of our troops.”
The previous day, 34 people awaiting to collect food were killed by IDF personnel near an aid centre operated by the Israeli- and US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a body whose dubious credentials never cease to amaze. Eyewitnesses in the crowd, including Heba Jouda and Mohamed Abed, recall Israeli troops firing on Palestinians massed around 4 a.m. at the Flag Roundabout prior to the scheduled opening of the Rafah food centre. The roundabout is located some hundreds of metres from the GHF centre, and has been the site of numerous shootings. “Fire was coming from everywhere,” stated Jouda, a worn figure who has made the harrowing journey to the aid centre a number of times. “It’s getting worse by the day.”
The International Committee on the Red Cross (ICRC) confirmed receiving 200 people at its field hospital located in the Al-Mawasi area near Rafah. Up till that point, the ICRC stated that it had been “the highest number received by the Red Cross Field Hospital in one mass casualty incident.” Carrie Garavan, a British Red Cross nurse working at the field hospital, notes the daily flow of casualties into the facility, most of whom have been queuing for food. “We are having mass casualty incidents almost every day, sometimes twice a day.”
The GHF, for its part, is lukewarm to the fattening butcher’s bill. None of the shooting incidents, claimed a spokesperson to The Associated Press, “have occurred at our sites or during operating hours.” Implying that those seeking aid were responsible for their own demise, the spokesperson went on to explain that they had moved “during prohibited times … or trying to take a shortcut.” How irresponsible of them.
In oral evidence given to the UK Foreign Affairs Committee on June 16, Anna Halford, the Médecins Sans Frontières emergency coordinator for Gaza, found it “difficult to overstate at what point this is neither a humanitarian enterprise nor a system.” The entire Israeli aid effort in Gaza, as things stood, “was basically lethal chaos.” Prior to the current lethal order of aid distribution, 400 to 500 community-level points were functioning for those seeking food. Kitchens cooking hot meals and bakeries supplying bread were plentiful. The numbers currently operating had plummeted to four.
Halford’s picture of what is being provided is grisly. The rations are only of the dry variety. There is an absence of clean water and cooking fuel, with no cooking gas entering the enclave since March 2. Substitute kerosene has proven woefully inadequate, causing those using it burns. Food is cooked on broken wooden pallets, salvaged plastic taken from piles of rubbish or turned up cardboard boxes.
As for the justification given by Israel for the imposition of such onerous, cruel restrictions to the provision of aid – the deviation and theft of aid by Hamas or allied forces – Halford, speaking on behalf of MSF, was sharp in rebuke. While no aid system could ever guarantee against some deviation or theft of supplies, Israel had never offered any evidence to back its claims. “It is a strawman; it is a specious and cynical position meant to undermine a humanitarian system that was actually functioning.” And that is precisely the point of the current, sanguinary exercise.
Aid as a Means to Commit Genocide
by Brendan O’Soro / June 14th, 2025
It’s been apparent for some time that the Israeli government intends to expel or kill the population of Gaza and claim the territory. This has become so obvious that even the establishment press is belatedly beginning to notice. In an editorial, the world’s leading business journal, the Financial Times, observed that “each new offensive makes it harder not to suspect that the ultimate goal of Netanyahu’s far-right coalition is to ensure Gaza is uninhabitable and drive Palestinians from their land” (emphasis mine). I’m not quite sure what would need to happen before the Financial Times would consider its suspicions confirmed; the Israeli Prime Minister is much more assertive about his intentions, he identified the expulsion of Gazans to be among his “clear conditions” for ending his genocidal campaign; he speaks of emptying Gaza as one empties a dustbin, and with the same regard for its contents. However, because coverage from the corporate press has been so incommensurate with the scale of the horrors, even this tepid statement from the Financial Times is progress.
The Israelis have sought to render Gaza uninhabitable, and then encourage what they’re perversely calling “voluntary emigration.” They’ve embraced the logic that someone fleeing a burning building has “volunteered” to leap from the window. This strategy has many components to it: tens of thousands (at least) of Gazans have been massacred by the Israelis, most of the buildings have been destroyed (the Israelis have begun a campaign to eliminate the ones that remain standing after previous assaults), the Gazan health care infrastructure has been repeatedly attacked, and the entire Gaza Strip has been subjected to a medieval siege, the consequences of which have left the population critically short of food and medicine. After reducing Gaza to starvation through months of total blockade, Israel turned aid distribution into another mechanism of murder or expulsion.
An entity with the philanthropic-sounding name the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), whose name is so starkly at odds with its function that it might have been coined by a satirist, has been tasked with providing aid to the Gazan population. Anyone familiar with Orwell could likely guess the character of a group with such a crudely propagandistic name. Some organizations have demonstrated the competence to deliver aid and the desire to do so efficaciously, but GHF isn’t one of them. Credible humanitarian organizations were disregarded and the GHF empowered, for reasons that Israeli officials have been forthcoming enough to articulate.
The Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was clear about why he decided to slightly relax the siege that Gaza had been subjected to: Israeli allies were beginning to become squeamish about the forced starvation of the entire population of Gaza. These same allies have supported the Israeli campaign despite the International Court of Justice ruling that it’s plausible Israel is violating the Genocide Convention, and despite the International Criminal Court issuing arrest warrants for top Israeli leaders. The supporters of Israel have demonstrated a willingness to tolerate a great deal of savagery. But Israel’s “closest friends in the world,” as Netanyahu tells us, can’t “handle pictures of mass starvation,” so “minimal” aid deliveries must be allowed. There are no moral concerns about causing a famine in Gaza, only pragmatic considerations. Netanyahu said that “we cannot reach a point of starvation, for practical and diplomatic reasons.” Doing so may cross a “red line” that could cause Israel to lose the support of the United States. Starvation is not wrong—merely inconvenient, like a dinner guest who overstays his welcome.
Another key objective is to force the Gazan population to the southern portion of the territory and then induce them to leave for other countries. The Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, speaking at a conference in the first week of May, said: “Within a few months we will be able to declare that we have won. Gaza will be totally destroyed.” He went on to say: “The Gazan citizens will be concentrated in the south. They will be totally despairing, understanding that there is no hope and nothing to look for in Gaza, and will be looking for relocation to begin a new life in other places.” Under the new scheme, the aid distribution sites were limited to only four locations (it was 400 locations when the United Nations was managing the dispersal of aid), and the sites were strategically located in the South of the Strip, which forces the population to congregate in these areas. They will reside under conditions that Israeli planners privately concede will be likened to “concentration camps.”
But that’s only if the Palestinians reach the distribution sites. Kit Malthouse, a conservative member of parliament in the United Kingdom said that the aid distribution system the United Nations was managing was replaced with “a shooting gallery, an abattoir, where starving people are lured out through combat zones to be shot at.” The United Nations was less poetic when voicing its condemnation of the GHF scheme, it merely said that “aid distribution has become a death trap.” Every day brings news of another massacre at an aid distribution center. The public has been subjected to the standard Israeli deceptions about these incidents, but Israeli culpability becomes clear whenever the evidence is honestly interrogated. At the time of this writing, 245 Palestinian aid seekers have been killed by the Israelis and more than 2,152 were injured; the level of savagery is such that the number is certain to be greater within moments after being transcribed.
Let us dispense with the fiction of ignorance. The evidence is not hidden, it is flaunted. The intent is not obscured, it is bragged about. The Israeli government, with the serene assurance of a state that knows its crimes will be subsidized, barely troubles itself with denials anymore. And the United States remains a participant in these crimes.
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